Language Birth and Death

12 Aug 2004 9:50 AR AR225-AN33-09.tex AR225-AN33-09.
sgm LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: IBC

10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143852
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2004. 33:201–22

doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143852
Copyright
c 2004 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH

Salikoko S. Mufwene
Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago,
Illinois 60637; email: s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
Key Words ecology, exploitation colony, settlement colony, language

endangerment, “langue minorée”
■ Abstract Since the late 1980s, language endangerment and death have been dis-
cussed as if the phenomena had no connection at all with language birth. More recently
the phenomena have been associated almost exclusively with the intense and pervasive
economic globalization of same period, a process that some authors have reduced too
easily to the McDonaldization phenomenon. Moreover, the relation of globalization to
different forms of colonization has been poorly articulated. As a matter of fact, little of
the longer history of population movements and contacts since the dawn of agriculture
has been invoked in the literature on language endangerment to give some broader per-
spective on the mechanisms of language birth and death and on the ecological factors
that bear on how they proceed. This review aims to remedy these shortcomings in our
scholarship.
INTRODUCTION
Linguistics publications on language endangerment and death have increased since
Dorian’s (1989) Investigating Obsolescence and more so since the 1992 publica-
tion of a special issue of Language (the Linguistic Society of America’s jour-
nal) on the subject matter. Books alone include the following: Fishman (1991),
Robins & Uhlenbeck (1991), Brenzinger (1992, 1998), Hagège (1992, 2000),
Mühlhäusler (1996), Cantoni (1997), Dixon (1997), Grenoble & Whaley (1998),
Hazaël-Massieux (1999), Reyhner et al. (1999), Crystal (2000), Nettle & Romaine
(2000), Skutnab-Kangas (2000), Hinton & Hale (2001), Maffi (2001), Mufwene
(2001), Swaan (2001), Dalby (2002), Harmon (2002), Joseph et al. (2003), Maurais
& Morris (2003), and Phillipson (2003). Experts will undoubtedly notice some
omissions in this list, but one cannot help noticing the strong interest the subject
matter has aroused among linguists over the past two decades.
Research and publications on new language varieties have interested linguists
in a less dramatic way, despite the high visibility of Bickerton (1981, 1984),
Thomason & Kaufman (1988), and Chaudenson (1992, 2001). This asymmetry
may reflect the concern among linguists—stated in numerous publications—about
the increasing loss of linguistic materials that should inform them about typologi-
cal variation. It also may be due to the following: Although genetic linguistics has
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202 MUFWENE
always been about speciation, researchers have typically focused on whether par-
ticular language varieties descend from the same ancestor and can thus be claimed
to be genetically related—hence the central methodological role accorded to the
comparative method. Linguists have not connected research on the development
of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties, which is obviously on the birth of
new language varieties, to genetic linguistics. Thus, because of the way linguists
think contact exerted an unusually major influence on these cases of language
divergence, Thomason & Kaufman (1988), for instance, are more interested in
showing how the development of creoles, pidgins, and the like deviates from what
they see as the normal or usual kind of language change and speciation than in
explaining the process of language birth itself.
Overall, the way that scholarship on language loss and birth has developed
reflects in some ways the fact that genetic linguistics has assumed scenarios in
which language contact has played an incidental, rather than catalytic, role. Such
scenarios seem so artificial when one recognizes, for instance, that the diversifica-
tion of Indo-European languages has been concurrent with the gradual dispersal of
Indo-European populations in Europe and parts of Asia. The dispersal was a long
migratory process during which these populations came in contact with non-Indo-
Europeans. Because they did not relocate at the same pace, nor along the same
routes, they often subsequently came in contact with each other. For instance, the
Romans, speaking an Italic language, came in contact with the Celts, as would the
Germanics some centuries later, though most of the Celts would already be Latiniz-
ing during that time. Little has been said about how languages vanished in Europe
while Proto-Indo-European was speciating into so many modern languages.
Since the late 1980s, research on language loss has focused primarily on the
indigenous languages of European ex-colonies and to some extent on minority
languages of the European Union—languages such as Breton, Occitan, Basque,
Sami, and Gaelic, which are still endangered by the official and dominant languages
of their nations. The almost-exclusive association of language death and birth either
with the emergence of modern European nation states united by single national
languages or with Europe’s colonization of most of the world since the sixteenth
century has led to the illusion that both processes may be recent developments in the
history of mankind.1 The overemphasis on worldwide economic globalization as
the primary cause of language loss has prevented any fruitful comparisons between,
on the one hand, recent and current evolutions and, on the other, what must have
occurred during the earliest political and economic hegemonies in the history of
mankind. The closest thing to what I suggest can be found in Hagège (2000).
Although current research on language birth and death is well grounded in
population contacts, the relevant literature does not highlight the fact that these
1
Indeed there have been attempts to compare with “creolization” the development of Ro-
mance languages (e.g., Schlieben-Lange 1977) or that of Middle English (e.g., Bailey &
Maroldt 1977), but such studies have been negatively criticized for good and bad reasons
(e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988, regarding English).
LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 203
processes usually have occurred under the same, or related, socioeconomic con-
ditions identified by Mufwene (2001) as “ecological.” For instance, the birth of
creoles in the plantation settlement colonies of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans is
a concomitant of language shift among the African populations who developed
them. Likewise, the emergence of American English(es) is concomitant both of
the gradual loss of especially continental European languages that came in contact
with English in North America and of the restructuring of English varieties brought
over from England (regardless of whether linguists factor in influence from the
other languages).
In this review, I elaborate on these observations, focusing especially on the
concern that scholars such as Nettle & Romaine (2000), Skutnab-Kangas (2000),
and Maffi (2001) express about loss of “biodiversity” applied to the coexistence
of languages. I historicize both colonization and economic globalization to show
how they are related and provide differential ecologies for language birth and
death. I highlight speakers as the unwitting agents of these phenomena, while
also questioning the adequacy of terms such as language war, killer language, and
linguicide.
My approach is generally the same as that taken in Mufwene (2001),2 largely
inspired by population genetics, with languages considered as populations of idi-
olects and, in respect to their evolutionary characteristics, as analogous to parasitic,
viral species. Space limitations preclude justifying this position here. To suffice,
the following assumptions are central to most of the discussion in the rest of this
review: (a) languages are internally variable (between idiolects and between di-
alects); (b) they do not evolve in uniform ways, as changes may proceed faster
or differently in one segment of a population of its speakers than they would in
another; (c) the same language may thrive in one ecology but do poorly in another;
(d) like biological species, their vitality depends on the ecology of their existence
or usage; and (e) like viruses, language features may change several times in their
lifetime. But we should start by articulating the meanings of language “birth” and
“death” more explicitly.
THE MEANINGS OF BIRTH AND DEATH

APPLIED TO LANGUAGES
The notions birth and death actually provide more arguments for treating languages
as species. Languages are unlike organisms in the way they are born or die. As well
noted by Chaudenson (1992, 2001, 2003) in the case of creoles, and Szulmajster
2
Readers familiar with Harmon (1996) (with which I was not familiar until after completing
this review) will notice several differences in our conceptions of the “linguistic species”
and how he and I apply it to language evolution, as complementary as our positions are. For
instance, my justifications here, as in Mufwene (2001), are quite different from his (which
are also repeated in Harmon 2002).
204 MUFWENE
(2000) regarding Yiddish, languages as communal phenomena cannot be issued

birth or death certificates. The relevant processes are protracted, spanning several
generations. The concept of “language birth” is in fact a misnomer of some sort. The
birth involves no pregnancy and delivery stages, and the term refers to a stage (not a
point in time!) in a divergence process during which a variety is acknowledged post
facto as structurally different from its ancestor. For instance, no particular point in
time can be associated with the emergence of creoles as separate vernaculars from
the colonial European languages from which they evolved. Unlike in the case
of organisms, but as in the case of species, language birth cannot be predicted.
The recognition of separateness is made possible by a cumulative accretion of
divergence features relative to an ancestor language, regardless of whether linguists
consider contact with other languages.
Likewise, language death is a protracted change of state.3 Used to describe
community-level loss of competence in a language, it denotes a process that does
not affect all speakers at the same time nor to the same extent. Under one conception
of the process, it concerns the statistical assessment of the maintenance versus loss
of competence in a language variety among its speakers. Total death is declared
when no speakers are left of a particular language variety in a population that had
used it.4
An important question nowadays has also been whether Latin—whose standard
variety (Classical Latin) is still the lingua franca of the Vatican and whose vernacu-
lar, nonstandard variety (Vulgar Latin) has evolved into the Romance languages—
is really a dead language (Hagège 2000)? If so, what is the most critical criterion
to identify a language as dead? Is language death predicated on the presence of
native speakers and on its transmission from one generation of speakers to another
without the mediacy of the scholastic medium?5 And in the case of the evolution
3
To be sure, cases of sudden language death by genocide have been attested (see, e.g.,
Hagège 2000 and Nettle & Romaine 2000), but they are rare compared to the other cases
most commonly discussed in the literature. They are not really part of natural evolution
by competition and selection, as explained in the conclusions section below. They are not
discussed in the present section.
4
It is less clear whether a language is still alive, just moribund, or simply “in poor health”
when it is used by semispeakers, individuals who claim they speak it but mix its vocabulary
and grammar with another language system. Dorian’s (1981) discussion of Scottish Gaelic
has made such cases an important part of understanding language “obsolescence.”
5
Space limitations prevent the author from pursuing this issue here. Assessing the vitality of
a language variety in relation to its association with native speakers would, for instance, en-
tail questioning the legitimacy of identifying pidgins as languages. The status of makeshift
languages such as Esperanto would also become problematic. Likewise, it would be mis-
guided not to include the school system among the mechanisms of language transmission.
Not doing so would make it difficult to account for the spread of major European lingua
francas such as English and French around the world. It would also call for a reassessment
of the status of Irish in Ireland as a natural language being passed by one generation to
another.
of a language into a new variety, what is the relationship between language death
and language birth? Can these processes be considered as two facets of the same
process? Needless to say these are aspects of death that are untypical of organisms.
More benefits from conceiving of languages as species or populations of idiolects
become obvious below.
QUESTIONING SOME USUAL ACCOUNTS

OF LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH
As noted above, the birth of new language varieties is central to creolistics, to the
study of indigenized varieties of European languages, and to historical dialectol-
ogy.6 The list of titles is too long to include here, and any choice of a representative
list would be biased. Consistent with the genetic linguistics tradition, few scholars
are interested in the birth process itself, except that in the case of creoles and indig-
enized varieties, some linguists acknowledge language contact and the influence of
non-European languages on the European targets as important ecological factors.
As in the case of creoles, the emergence of new dialects in former settlement
colonies has not been correlated with the concurrent erosion and death of other
European languages that did not become the official languages of the relevant
colonies, for instance, French, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and German, among
a host of others, in the United States. Works such as Haugen (1953) and Clyne
(2003), to cite two chronological extremes, are based more on language obso-
lescence than on the emergence of new varieties of the dominant language. That
language contact is seldom invoked to account for the divergence of these new,
colonial dialects of European languages—which has implicitly contributed to mak-
ing the development of creoles so curious—remains an intriguing matter. Linguists
have generally overlooked the topic of their birth itself, which very well can be
discussed in relation to that of indigenized varieties of the same languages (see,
e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Thomason 2001, Winford 2003). One important
exception to the above bias, insofar as the evolution of English is concerned, is
the growing literature on Hiberno-English, as represented, for example, by Kallen
(1997).
6
The foci have been different in these research areas. Most creolists seek to demonstrate that
creoles (and pidgins) are natural and as rule-governed as other languages, whereas students
of indigenized varieties argue that these varieties are as legitimate offspring of English
as the varieties said to be “native” and are spoken in former settlement colonies such as
the Americas or Australia, where populations of European descent are now majorities.
(Creoles are associated primarily with island and coastal plantation settlement colonies
of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, where populations of non-European descent are now
majorities.) Historical dialectology focuses mostly on the nonstandard vernaculars of former
settlement colonies, almost overlooking the fact that the varieties spoken today in their
European metropoles are just as new.
206 MUFWENE
More specifically, Thomason (2001) correctly notes that history provides sev-
eral instances of language death. However, the linguistics literature of the past two
decades on language endangerment has rarely included comparisons with older
cases in human history. As noted above, the growing scholarship on the subject
matter has focused on the recent and ongoing attrition of the indigenous lan-
guages of former European colonies. In the vast majority of cases, these languages
(especially the indigenous languages of the Americas and Australia) certainly
have played a marginal role in the evolution of the European varieties that either
have driven them to extinction or are threatening them. Thus it would be unjus-
tified to expect the relevant literature to have related the topic of language death
with that of language birth. One can, in fact, expect similar scholarship about
Europe to have related these processes with the experience of several European
languages that have become langues minorées.7 As described below, capturing
these parallel evolutions would have enabled us to better understand why lan-
guages have been dying so rapidly since the nineteenth century.
The literature generally has invoked globalization to account for the loss or
endangerment of several non-European languages. Unfortunately few have artic-
ulated what globalization means. This phenomenon has been confused too often
with McDonaldization, i.e., the spread of McDonald stores around the world (see,
e.g., Nettle & Romaine 2000). Likewise, the literature says nothing about whether
globalization is novel and how it relates to colonization. This connection is critical
because the related applied literature on the revitalization of endangered languages
seldom refers to the ecology that would be most favorable to the revitalization pro-
cess. Would commitment on the part of the relevant linguistic communities alone
suffice? Or would any conditions other than the precolonial ones, under which
most of these languages thrived, be supportive of the revitalization efforts?
The vitality of languages cannot be dissociated from the socioeconomic interests
and activities of their speakers. Native Americans have not been shifting from their
native vernaculars to those of the European colonists because they have lost pride in
their traditions, and the Celts have not either in giving up their indigenous languages
7
Hazaël-Massieux (2000) reports an important distinction made by French sociolinguists
between langue minoritaire (minority language) and langue minorée (undervalued and/or
marginalized language). The latter need not be spoken by a minority population. Like Haitian
Creole, it may be spoken by the majority population of a polity but is relegated to ethno-
graphically “low” communicative functions. If this view is taken literally, most indigenous
languages in former European colonies fall into this category because they are not asso-
ciated with the “high(er)” communicative functions of their polities. (See Pandharipande
2003 regarding such situations in India.) Consistent with seemingly precocious predictions
that 50%–90% of the world’s languages will have vanished by the end of the twenty-first
century, the approach misleadingly suggests the same outlook onto the coexistence of lan-
guages of the powerless and of the powerful everywhere. However, the history of the world
shows that languages of the powerless often have been more resilient, or demonstrated more
vitality, than those of the powerful. Pace Fishman (2003), there is much more ecological
complexity and variability that must be considered on this subject matter, as attempted, for
instance, by Pandharipande (2003).
in favor of Vulgar Latin—and later, the Romance languages—or English. The

reasons for these shifts cannot be (so) different from those that led numerous
Europeans to give up their heritage languages in favor of the dominant ones in the
Americas and Australia.
Because language loss and endangerment to date have not been uniformly
catastrophic in different parts of the world, one asks whether globalization has
been uniform. Why are Native American languages more endangered in North
America, where English has been so dominant, than in Latin America? Does
any correlation exist between this discrepancy and the fact that in the Americas
creoles developed more in former French and English plantation colonies than in
Portuguese and Spanish ones? Do the reasons for all these cases of language loss
differ from those that caused the loss of African languages in the New World?
Like other populations, language shift among Native Americans seems to be
an adaptive response to changing socioeconomic conditions, under which their
heritage languages have been undervalued and marginalized. Native Americans
recognize the economic value of the European colonial languages supported by
the new, global-economy world order. This explanation is consistent also with
why indigenous languages in former exploitation colonies of Africa and Asia have
been losing grounds not to European colonial languages but to (new) indigenous
vernaculars (former lingua francas) associated with new indigenous urban life, such
as Swahili in much of East Africa, Town Bemba in Zambia, Lingala in parts of the
Democratic Republic of Congo and of the Republic of Congo, Wolof in Senegal,
Malay in Indonesia and Malaysia, and Hindi in India. Globalization has not affected
former exploitation colonies in the same way it affected former settlement colonies.
Several factors contribute to making these new indigenous languages more realistic
targets than the European colonial ones, for instance, the high rate of illiteracy, the
scarcity of jobs requiring command of European languages, the fact that other jobs
are accessible with command of an indigenous lingua franca (which is acquired
by oral interaction with speakers of the language), and the fact that an inspiring
urban culture is expressed also in the same non-European lingua franca. Below I
return to this topic.
Invoking lack of pride or prestige to account for the loss of minority languages
and of the langues minorées fails to explain why the Romance languages evolved
from Vulgar Latin (the nonstandard variety) rather than from Classical Latin; why,
where Latin prevailed, it was not offset by Ancient Greek, despite the higher
prestige of the latter even among the Roman elite; and why Sanskrit is dead, or
dying, despite all the prestige it carries relative to other Indic languages. Other
ecological factors exist also that we should endeavor to identify, for instance, why
part of the western Roman Empire romanized but most of the eastern part did not,
despite the extended presence of the Romans in the territory;8 or why in areas of
the same eastern part of the Roman Empire Arabic managed to impose itself as an
8
To be sure, Romanian is an important exception, to which must be added Aromanian and
Megleno-Romanian, spoken by the Vlah minorities of Albania, Macedonia, and Greece
(Friedman 2001). As the names suggest, they are related to Romanian.
208 MUFWENE
important language (at the expense of both Greek and Latin) but nothing like this
happened in the western part of the Empire. Answers to such questions should help
scholars understand what ecological factors are particularly conducive to language
endangerment and death.
Efforts to revitalize some of the endangered languages have been devoted largely
to developing writing systems for them and generating written literature. Noble
as they are, most of these endeavors have also confused revitalization, which
promotes usage of a language in its community, with preservation, which does
nothing more than preserve texts in (and accounts of) a language basically as
museum artifacts. Classical Latin and Ancient Greek, among others, are cited as
dead languages, despite the abundant literature available in them. The absence of
a writing system has not led to the extinction of nonstandard varieties of the same
European languages that have endangered non-European languages, as stigma-
tized as the nonstandard varieties have been for centuries now.9 In fact, the new
Indo-European vernaculars spoken in European settlement colonies of the Amer-
icas and Australia have developed from the contact of many of these varieties
among themselves—not of standard varieties. Such evolutions shows that lack of
prestige does not equate with lack of vitality. Likewise, despite numerous predic-
tions of their imminent death, unwritten nonstandard vernaculars such as Gullah
and African American Vernacular English have shown much resilience (Mufwene
1994, 1997).10
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE

BIRTH AND DEATH
The Recent Past
The correlation of language death with globalization as an economic network of
production and consumption interdependencies is partly correct. However, it does
not uniformly affect the whole world, especially when it is conceived of at the
9
One should remember here that terms such as patois and brogue used in reference to
nonstandard varieties of French and English, respectively—and the former also in reference
to Celtic languages in rural France—have had negative connotations in part because they
are generally unwritten. Earlier uses of the term jargon, associated also with some contact
language varieties, have similar negative connotations of “unintelligible,” “meaningless,”
or “gibberish.”
10
Since DeCamp’s (1971) study, which repeats a hypothesis conjectured already by
Schuchardt (1914) and Bloomfield (1933), several creoles have been assumed by linguists
to die by a process misidentified as decreolization (Mufwene 1994, 2001). However, va-
rieties such as Jamaican Creole (ironically the focus of DeCamp’s own speculation) are
not only still thriving but also developing more divergent varieties such as “Dread Talk”
(Pollard 2000). Mufwene (1997) argues that Gullah may be dying for a reason independent
of “decreolization” qua debasilectalization, e.g., the massive exodus of its speakers to the
city, where the variety is given up not only because it is stigmatized but also because it is
economically useless in the urban environment.
scale of multinational corporations that run the economies of the most industrial
nations of North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and some city-states
such as Singapore and Hong Kong. One should bear in mind also that globalization
as explained here can be very local, as in the case of many aspects of American
industry such as food production. It often applies to regional organizations like
the European Union and the Association of South East Asian Nations, in which
partners set up privileged trade and/or production relations.
Globalization seems to have exerted the greatest impact on languages at mostly
the local level, and the impact has been more disastrous to indigenous languages in
former settlement colonies than to those in exploitation colonies. This differential
evolution reflects the fact that in settlement colonies the European colonists sought
to create new Europes outside their metropoles (Crosby 1986) from which they
inherited the ideology of nation-states ideally unified by one single language. As
the European populations became the majority in their new nations, they adopted
a dominant or official language for branches of their government, in the emer-
gent global industry, and in the school system. The chosen language gradually
penetrated the private domains of citizens’ lives to the point that it became the
vernacular spoken by almost everybody.
To be sure, the shift from other European languages to the dominant one was not
sudden, nor did it affect all populations and their respective members concurrently.
The slaves everywhere were the first to lose their ancestral languages, not so much
because they were forbidden to speak them or were always put in situations so
multilingual that they could not do so, but because of the way the plantation
societies developed from earlier homesteads. As explained by Chaudenson (1992,
2001), the latter, farm-size dwellings, in which the slaves were the minority and
well-integrated into family units, did not favor the retention of African languages.
This outcome of language competition resulted because creole children in these
settings learned to speak the colonial European languages rather than the language
of their African parents. Creole children were mixed and looked after together,
regardless of race, while all the healthy adults worked together to develop the
colonial economic infrastructure. Moreover, the African-born slaves typically did
not form a critical mass to continue speaking their languages among themselves,
even if someone who spoke the same language worked in the same or a nearby
homestead.
As some of the homesteads became large plantations, in which African-born
slaves would gradually become the majority, the creole and, later, the seasoned
slaves speaking modified varieties of the colonial languages (be they creoles or
other nonstandard varieties) became linguistic models, similar to how city-born
children in Africa serve as models for rural-born children. This ethnographic state
of affairs played a central role in favoring language shift, and therefore loss, in
the settlement colonies. By the founder principle, the newcomers simply found it
more practical to learn the vernacular spoken by the slaves who preceded them,
even if they were lucky enough to find someone with whom they could speak a
common African language in private. The same founder principle accounts for
language shift and loss among post-Abolition indentured laborers from Africa and
210 MUFWENE
Asia who gradually assimilated to the creole ex-slaves. Neither their initial social
isolation nor their relative ethnolinguistic homogeneity could prevent the change
of vernaculars. (See, e.g., Mohan & Zador 1986 and Bhatia 1988 regarding the
Indian indentured laborers, Ferreira 1999 regarding the Portuguese, and Warner-
Lewis 1996 regarding the Yoruba, all of these cases applying to Trinidad.) In fact,
the stigmatization of the identured laborers by the Creoles must have exerted more
pressure on them to shift from their heritage vernaculars to Creole. The pressure
to avoid the stigma as “uncivilized” was additional to the basic necessity to use
the local language to adapt linguistically to the new socioeconomic world order.
For the same reason of adaptation to a changing socioeconomic ecology, the
European populations that spoke languages other than the dominant one gave up
their ancestral vernaculars, quite gradually, in a process that would continue until
the twentieth century. (See, e.g., Haugen 1953, regarding the Scandinavians, and
Salmons 2003, regarding the Germans). The main reason for the protracted shift
is that the Europeans, especially those who did not come as indentured servants,
were nationally segregated (see, e.g., Fischer 1989) and could continue to use their
ancestral languages as vernaculars within their ethnic communities. Not only are
American cities nowadays still segregated into white and black neighborhoods,
but also they have inherited from the pre–World War II period names such as
Irish, Italian, and German neighborhoods as a legacy of the way Europeans were
segregated even among themselves. While they lasted, the maintenance of these
national identities and speakers’ abilities within the relevant communities to run
local business in their ancestral vernaculars (Salmons 2003)11 only decelerated
the language shift process.
These developments suggest that in losing their indigenous languages Native
Americans have followed the evolutionary trajectory already taken by immigrants
to their land, who were developing an economic system that made obselete the
Native American one. Thus, ecological pressures for survival forced Native Amer-
icans to adapt to the new world order, which entailed some command of the local
dominant European language to earn a living. The language shift proceeded faster
where miscegenation with the newcomers was allowed. It was made possible other-
wise by exodus to the city and other places for jobs. Basically language loss among
Native Americans has been a concomitant process of Americanization in the sense
of departure from their ancestral socioeconomic lifestyles to those belonging to
the European immigrants.
The fact that fewer Native American languages have vanished in Latin Amer-
ica than in North America suggests that globalization has not proceeded at the
same speed in settlement colonies. The differential evolution seems to reflect the
kind of economy that the European settlers developed and/or the kind of physical
11
Salmons (2003) reports that the Germans in Wisconsin owned parochial schools and
published newspapers and other literature in their languages until the readership waned
because an increasing number of community members were attracted by the larger, urban
American global economy.
ecological challenges they faced in spreading from the Atlantic coast. For instance,
the Amazon forest has been difficult and slow for the colonists to penetrate, and
the Amazon is precisely where the highest concentration of Native American
languages can be found today. It is not by accident that deforestation and the im-
mediate impact of this exploitation on the indigenous population have awakened
our awareness of language endangerment, on the model of species endangerment
in macroecology. Deforestation has made obvious the fact that changes in the
habitat and economic activities of a population bear on the vitality of its language
and culture, as its members adapt to new lifestyles. More languages have died in
North America because changes in its socioeconomic ecology have been more
advanced and have affected its populations more pervasively. Basically the same
explanation applies to the extensive loss of indigenous languages in Australia.
The less marginalized the Natives are from the local global economy system, the
more likely they are to lose their heritage.
This explanation does not apply to former exploitation colonies of Africa and
Asia, where relatively fewer indigenous languages are threatened and where they
are typically endangered not by the European colonial languages but by other
indigenous languages. The latter have sometimes stood in the way of the demo-
graphic expansion of their European competitors, as in the case of Lingala in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Swahili in Tanzania. Numerous ecological
reasons explain this differential development: (a) The European colonizers hardly
intended to settle permanently in these continents, although many of them wound
up doing so; (b) the European exploitation colony system hardly intended to share
its languages with the indigenous populations, preferring to teach the colonial
languages only to an elite class of auxiliaries that would serve as intermediaries
between the colonizers and the colonized (see, e.g., Brutt-Griffler 2002a, 2002b);
(c) unlike in the earlier cases that produced pidgins (such as in Nigeria, Cameroon,
and Papua New Guinea), European languages were introduced in the exploitation
colonies in the nineteenth century as lingua francas on the basis of scholastic inputs
rather than as vernaculars naturalistically transmitted outside the school system;
(d) despite the higher status they gained from Western-style education and asso-
ciation with the now-indigenized varieties of the European colonial languages,
most of the elite have not severed ties with their ancestral traditions—they have
continued to use their indigenous languages as vernaculars and/or as necessary
lingua francas for communication with their less-affluent relatives and with the
other members of their ethnic groups.
One must remember that while settlement colonization has gradually reduced—
though it has not yet fully eliminated—ethnic identities and languages among
populations of the new polities (especially among non-Europeans), exploitation
colonization has retained them, thus preserving the function of most indigenous
languages as markers of ethnic identity. Only the city, in Africa at least, has come
close to reducing ethnic identities and languages, acting like sugar cane planta-
tions and rice fields of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean settlement colonies, by being
a contact setting in which ethnolinguistically heterogeneous populations interact
212 MUFWENE
regularly with each other in a common language that becomes their vernacular.
The gradual obliteration of ethnic boundaries, caused in part by interethnic mar-
riages, is an important factor in the loss of ethnic languages.12
Dialogue Between the Recent and Distant Pasts

Languages have been dying for a long time in human history (e.g., Hagège 2000,
Mufwene 2001, Thomason 2001). Although linguists have correctly noted that
language death has proceeded at an unprecedented pace during the last century,
they have still not explained fully why languages die and what or who kills them.
As shown above, language death has not been uniform in different parts of the
world either. This nonuniformity also may have been the case in the distant past. It
should thus be rewarding to establish a heuristic bridge between the distant and the
recent pasts to learn what they can tell us about each other. As space is limited here,
I focus briefly on language evolution in the western side of the Roman Empire,
about which there is ample information on language evolution, and I focus on the
Romance countries and the British Isles.
To be sure, the Romans do not seem to have colonized Europe and the rest of the
Mediterranean world on the model of recent European exploitation or settlement
colonies.13 If anything, it was likely a combination of both styles, if we consider the
army veterans who retired and became land owners in Gaul, for instance, though
the economic exploitation of the colonies suggests more of the exploitation style
(Bauer 1996). There is little evidence also that the Romans claimed full nation-
wide geographical spaces as colonies. According to Polomé (1983), the Romans
likely took more interest in developing trade and military centers, a practice that
leads him to equate the Romanization of these colonies with urbanization. From
12
Students of creolization in Hawaii should remember that sugar cane cultivation did not
proceed here the same way it did in the Caribbean and Indian Oceans. Sugar cane cultivation
in Hawaii involved no slavery, the indentured laborers came at different times from only a
handful of ethnic groups (Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, and Philippino), and they
were not mixed on the plantations, where they lived in ethnically segregated houses and
continued to speak their ancestral languages as vernaculars. Unlike in the other plantation
settlement colonies, Hawaiian Creole English developed in the city, where there was more
cross-ethnic interaction, and Hawaiian Pidgin English developed concurrently (not before)
on the plantations (Roberts 1998). According to Chaudenson (1992, 2001) and Mufwene
(2001), plantation settlement colonies elsewhere produced no ecological conditions favor-
able to the development of Pidgin either prior to or concurrently with the emergence of
Creole. It is thus clear why ethnic distinctions and the related languages have survived
among descendants of the indentured laborers in Hawaii but not among descendants of
slaves in other settlement colonies (Mufwene 2004).
13
Trade colonization is not worth considering here because the structure of the Empire seems
to rule it out. Roman presence in the Empire was permanent, not sporadic. In recent history,
trade colonies generally evolved into settlement or exploitation colonies, which suggests
that the same evolution must have happened during Roman colonization. (See also Bauer
1996.)
the military and administrative domination point of view, they created networks
of towns interconnected by good road and water transportation infrastructures,
all ultimately leading to Rome.14 The Romans formed alliances with local rulers,
whom they coaxed to administer their territories in the Roman style, assisted with
their Roman technical expertise (including military), and enticed to work in the
economic interest of Rome (Garnsey & Saller 1987). These leaders were taught
Classical Latin, their children were sent to Roman schools, they were granted
Roman citizenship, and they could compete with the Romans themselves for offices
as high as generalship, provincial governorship, and the Roman Senate. Some of
them, such as Marcus Ulpius Traianus (born in Spain), Lucius Septimus Severus
(born in North Africa), and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caesar (born in Gaul),
even rose to become emperors.15
Indirect evidence that the Romans did not colonize Europe on the settlement
model comes from the fact that they left the Western Empire in the fifth cen-
tury. However, the local rulers, who had Romanized already, maintained Latin as
the language of their administrations, while Vulgar Latin continued to be spoken
among those who had interacted regularly with the legionaries, whose children
conceived with indigenous women took advantage of their knowledge of the colo-
nial language to access important offices. Missionaries and the intellectual elite
continued to use Classical Latin, but linguistic evidence suggests that this standard
and scholastic variety had little, if anything at all, to do with the development of
the Romance languages.
More significant is that Roman colonies were not fully Latinized in the fifth
century. When the Romans left, lower classes (the population majority) continued
to use Celtic languages, especially in rural areas. According to Polomé (1983),
the nonruling classes were largely multilingual in a Celtic language, Latin, and
sometimes also Greek. This finding explains to some extent why it took up to the
twentieth century before the indigenous population of France, for instance, would
become fully francophone. The process of language shift was protracted and did
not affect all segments of the population concurrently.16
14
In a recent, still unpublished manuscript, Chaudenson emphasizes the role of waterways
before the invention of trains, planes, and telecommunication in spreading languages outside
their homelands. I return to the significance of geographical interconnectedness in economy
below. Indeed, the Roman Empire’s economic system instantiates some of the early stages
of globalization.
15
One must realize that Rome was too small to provide all the legionaries needed in the
Roman army and the manpower necessary to staff its colonial administration. Latin was
spread outside Rome largely by foreign mercenaries in the Roman legions, similar to how
English is spreading today as a world lingua franca significantly by nonnative speakers
using it and teaching it to others in their respective countries.
16
Bauer (1996, pp. 32) argues that Gaulish (her generic term for Celtic language varieties
spoken in Gaul) was already extinct by the seventh century, being replaced by nascent
Romance vernaculars similar to Provençal and Occitan. Lodge (1993) presents a similar
view. Breton, which was only moribund in the twentieth century, was brought to France
214 MUFWENE
The fact that no Romance language developed at all in England—although Latin

continued to be used there until the eighteenth century by the missionaries, by the
intellectual elite, and in the Hanseatic trade—confirms not only the above hypoth-
esis but also indirectly that the real shift to Latin as a vernacular for the masses of
the populations in today’s Romance countries took place only after the Romans
had left. The challenge for linguists is to articulate the specific post-Roman so-
cioeconomic dynamics that permitted the spread of Latin within the larger and
overwhelming majority of commoner populations, the role of the growing number
of towns and schools (noted by Bauer 1996 and Woolf 1998) notwithstanding. The
protracted development of the Romance languages under the substrate influence
of the Celtic languages is correlated with the gradual loss of the latter, as fewer
and fewer children found it useful to acquire the Celtic languages and learned
instead the derivatives of Latin now identified as Romance languages. Today the
Celtic languages and other more indigenous languages similar to Basque, formerly
spoken in the same territories, have vanished. If scholars wish to learn more about
language vitality, more specifically how some languages die and some others sur-
vive, then it would help to identify the particular socioeconomic conditions that
have helped Basque survive.
We could also explore why England, whose native populations during the Ro-
man rule were also Celtic, has Anglicized (i.e., Germanicized) instead. If the use
of Latin during the Roman rule proceeded in the same way in England as it did
in continental Europe, then it is justified for scholars to assume that the Ger-
manic colonizers (Jutes, Angles, and Saxons), who replaced the Romans, used
their nonindigenous languages in their military and political institutions. It is dif-
ficult, however, to avoid asking, for the sake of comparison, why Iberia and Gaul
continued to Romanize despite the later colonization of the former by the Arabs
from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries and that of the latter by the Franks from
the fifth to the ninth centuries.
Space limitations prevent me from addressing this question and other related
ones in detail here. To suffice, these questions underscore the need to distinguish be-
tween different colonization styles and the different ways the colonizers/colonists
interacted with the indigenous populations. It now seems necessary also to distin-
guish between different styles of settlement colonization. After all, the Franks did
settle in Gaul and eventually mixed with the Celtic populations. Could it be that
the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons had less respect for the Roman legacy than did the
Franks, as suggested by Lodge (1993) and Bauer (1996)? The fact that fewer than
a handful of their indigenous languages (notably Welsh and Irish) are still spoken
from England around the fifth century. Why its fate was different from that of the indigenous
Celtic languages is not clear. Thus, the term patois often used in the history of France in
reference to varieties considered unintelligible, chiefly to Parisians, must have applied to
many such rural Romance varieties. Regardless of whether the Celtic languages had died by
the seventh century, their death was gradual and the evolution of French into its present-day
form was even more protracted. Latin was acquired by the masses of the population after
the Romans had left.
today confirms the hypothesis that the insular Celts have Germanicized culturally
and linguistically. Linguistic evidence suggests that the gradual shift must have
occurred mostly after the languages of the Germanic colonizers mixed to produce
Old English (see, e.g., Vennemann 2001, 2002), which ultimately evolved into
modern English. In contrast, the Franks surrendered their Germanic traditions,
embracing the language and religion of the indigenous rulers, Latin and Catholi-
cism. More questions than I can address arise now about the differences in the ways
the Germanics colonized the Celts north and south of the Channel. Whether the
Arabs colonized Iberia on the model of the Franks or simply applied exploitation
colonization is even less clear. Future scholarship should address such questions
for linguistics to be better informed about the ecology of language death.
The above cases show also that language birth and death often proceed concur-
rently, though the balance sheet in almost all these territories likely has worked at
the expense of the indigenous languages. This conclusion is plausible, especially
when one does not consider the fact that the prevailing languages have evolved
into several varieties and we know nothing about their future.17 The histories of
England, France, and Iberia show also that the colonizers/colonists are not al-
ways successful in imposing their languages. Like the colonization of Gaul by
the Franks, the colonization of England by the Norse, the Danes, and the Nor-
man French did not produce language shifts of any consequence in the history
of this territory, except that the Anglicization of the Normans (Lüdtke 1995) led
to the development of a standard English, which is largely influenced by French,
though the influence of Latin as a scholarly language cannot be overlooked either.
No German is spoken as a vernacular in France outside Alsace, and no Arabic is
spoken as a vernacular in Spain or Portugal today, except among groups of recent
immigrants. And yet today, Arabic is the vernacular of North Africa, which was
colonized also by the Arabs in the seventh century. Does this mean that the Arabs
applied different colonization styles in different parts of the world, thus perhaps
applying a Roman-to-Frankish kind of exploitation colonization in Iberia, settle-
ment colonization in North Africa, and some sort of trade colonization in South
and East Asia? The linguistic consequences of Arabic colonization clearly vary in
different parts of the world, with Arabic functioning mostly as a religious language
east of the Middle East.
CONCLUSION
To summarize the review at this point without leaving out many other important
considerations relevant to its subject matter is difficult. I use this section to survey
some of them, connecting them indirectly to the above discussions. As noted
17
At the worldwide scale we have no idea whether 1000 years from today the different
varieties of English, for instance, still will be considered the same language. The fact
that some of them already have been disfranchised as “indigenized” raises the question of
whether some day they may not be considered separate languages all together in the same
way that creoles already are.
216 MUFWENE
in Mufwene (2001), parallelisms exist between language evolution in England

since the Germanic colonization, on the one hand, and language evolution in
North America since the European colonization, on the other hand. In both cases
the invaders came to settle new homes (Crosby 1986). Oversimplifying things
somewhat, note that in England the languages of the Germanics koinéized into
a new variety now called English and gradually displaced the indigenous Celtic
languages. In North America, as in other recent settlement colonies, the varieties
brought from the major colonial metropole likewise koinéized into new colonial
varieties and prevailed over the languages of both other European nations and
indigenous populations. The Celtic languages have died as gradually as the Native
American languages are dying now, regardless of the difference in speed.
Some similarities appear between former European exploitation colonies of
Asia and Africa, on the one hand, and Southwestern Europe as a former constella-
tion of Roman colonies, on the other. The most significant of these similarities may
be the fact that in both cases the language of the former colonizer has (initially)
been retained after independence as the language for the ethnographically high
functions of their societies. From this finding arises the following question: Are
the indigenized varieties of European languages likely to displace the indigenous
languages in the same way as the indigenization of Latin has in the now-Romance
countries?
This is really an open question because a great deal depends on how the
economies of the former exploitation colonies fare and how the masses of the
population are engaged in them. The emergence of an evolutionary path similar to
that of the Romance countries seems possible in economically successful, though
small, polities such as Singapore, where political leaders have promoted English as
the main language for the overall population. However, one cannot ignore the dif-
ferent language evolution course followed by another successful city state, Hong
Kong, where usage of English in the white-collar sector of the economy has had no
negative impact on Cantonese. The demographic dominance of the Cantonese in
Hong Kong, facilitated by the geographical proximity of Canton, makes this city
an endogenous contact setting more favorable to the retention of its major indige-
nous language. Although the Chinese are an overwhelming majority in Singapore,
they speak several Chinese varieties that are not necessarily mutually intelligible,
and they are surrounded by Malay-speaking countries, a situation that makes the
city an exogenous contact setting more likely to thrive with a colonial language.
Unfortunately theories of evolution do not predict the future, and only the future
will rule on these speculations.
For the vast majority of former exploitation colonies, one important factor bear-
ing on the fate of the European languages is the concurrent development of indige-
nous lingua francas that function also as urban vernaculars of the overwhelming
proletarian majorities. In kind, these nations share this particular evolutionary tra-
jectory with former plantation settlement colonies, which were indeed ruled like
exploitation colonies after the abolition of slavery and where creoles also are the
primary vernaculars of their proletarian majorities. To the extent that creoles are
considered separate languages by linguists, the economies of all these places have
functioned in more than one language: the indigenized/local standard variety of the
European language for the white-collar sector of the economy and an indigenous
lingua franca or some variety of Creole (mesolectal or basilectal) for the other
sectors of the economy. With the unemployment rate quite high and most of the
available jobs limited to the nonwhite-collar sector, most of the populations have
had no incentive to speak the European language, even if they learned it at school.
The elite continue to speak some variety of Creole—as is obvious in Haiti (Dejean
1993) and in Jamaica (Mufwene 2003)—or any of the indigenous languages to
remain in touch with less-fortunate members of their societies.18 There is thus an
ethnographic division of labor that does not make European languages a threat
to indigenous ones. However, in the same way that, thanks to the urban lifestyle
associated with it, the then-indigenizing Vulgar Latin of today’s Romance coun-
tries was attractive to rural populations, the urban vernaculars are attractive to
rural African populations in particular. (See also Pandharipande 2003 for a similar
situation in India). Although one can argue that the prestige of urban lifestyle is
having a negative impact on rural lifestyle, the notion of prestige itself, which
has been invoked often as an important factor in language attrition, must be re-
considered in rather complex relative terms. Otherwise one would have expected
European colonial languages to have given a fatal blow to the relevant indigenous
vernaculars.
Although there are undoubtedly several endangered African and Asian lan-
guages, it is evident that language attrition is proceeding slower in Africa and Asia
than it is in Europe and its former settlement colonies. Predictions of the imminent
extinction of non-European languages around the world, as if the process were
uniform everywhere, certainly must be reframed in a perspective that reflects the
complexity of the present state of competition and selection among the world’s
languages.
We also must reassess the adequacy of terms such as “language war,” “lingui-
cide,” and “killer language” in our academic discourse. These seem to be worse
misnomers than the terms “competition” and “selection,” which I prefer. The lat-
ter two terms concern values that speakers, as the immediate ecology of linguistic
species (Mufwene 2001, 2003), assign to the languages in their community. These
18
It is debatable whether the linguistic situation is that different in European countries and
former settlement colonies where noncreole varieties of European languages have prevailed.
Acrolectal varieties are used in the white-collar sector of the economy, whereas other
varieties, including basilectal ones, are used in the other sectors. These nonstandard varieties
are not endangered by their acrolectal counterparts. The few in this predicament, like the
Ocracoke Brogue, are affected by neighboring nonstandard varieties (Wolfram & Schilling
Estes 1995). Conservative, rural varieties of African American English (including Gullah)
are influenced more by urban varieties of the same language than by white vernaculars
(Bailey & Cukor-Avila 2005, Mufwene 1997, Wolfram & Thomas 2002). In general, non-
European languages in former settlement colonies also may have been endangered by
nonstandard vernaculars rather than by the standard varieties of the same languages.
218 MUFWENE
values determine which particular language they find more useful to their lives
and, conversely, which one they can afford not to speak and eventually do without.
A major problem with the former terms is that they overshadow the agency of
speakers as those who actually select and give up particular languages (although
they are not necessarily aware of their acts), a choice that allows some to thrive
and dooms others to extinction.
Languages do not engage in wars either, though they coexist in competition,
like biological species. Languages are more endangered when populations speak-
ing them interact peacefully with each other. As noted above, cases of language
extinction associated with genocide remain a very small minority in the history
of mankind. Moreover, in language competition, populations rarely engage in ac-
tivities that endanger some languages in a concerted way, certainly unlike sport
teams that anticipate some outcomes. Language endangerment is the cumulative
outcome of individual practices of speakers, though communal patterns emerge
from the ways their individual acts affect the vitality of their languages. The un-
planned cumulation of individuals’ practices into a communal behavior explains
why language attrition and death are such protracted processes. They proceed
in nonuniform ways in the relevant communities, affecting only subsets of the
relevant population at a time.
We can learn one last thing from language endangerment in England and the
Romance countries. It has everything to do with colonization and globalization,
with the former interpreted as the political and economic domination of a pop-
ulation by another and the latter interpreted as an economic network in which
the more powerful control production and consumption interdependencies. The
two seem to go hand in hand but not in the same ways everywhere. Globalization
proceeds faster and is more complex in the more recent than in the more distant
cases of colonization and is faster and more pervasive in settlement colonies than
in exploitation and trade colonies. Globalization cannot be confused with Mc-
Donaldization as the worldwide distribution of McDonald’s and other fast-food
restaurants as symbols of American lifestyle. McDonaldization, which is similar
to the French terms mondialisation (universalization), is made possible by glob-
alization but not the other way around. Moreover, as noted above, globalization is
often local or regional. The smaller number of American fast-food restaurants and
the shift of socioeconomic status associated with them in some former exploitation
colonies, where one can be invited to McDonald’s for a good dinner, is also an
indication of the nonuniform way in which globalization has proceeded. Global-
ization has created economic inequities among the world’s nations (Faraclas 2001,
Stiglitz 2002, Blommaert 2003), and those inequities seem to be correlated with
the uneven way in which language endangerment is proceeding.
I assume that primitive forms of colonization and globalization must have started
with the domination of hunter gatherers by agriculturalists (see also Harmon 2002)
and that these processes already had become more complex by the time the capi-
talist system had evolved in Europe, producing nation-states associated typically
with single national languages and leading to the European colonization of the
rest of the world over the past half millennium. Although political colonization is
no longer in style, economic colonization has become more insidious and glob-
alization much more complex, affecting former exploitation colonies differently
from Europe and its former settlement colonies. From the language endangerment
point of view, the settlement colonies are almost replicating the experience of Eu-
rope, where only 3% of the world languages are spoken today (Mayor & Bindé
2001). We have no clear picture of how language shift will proceed in most former
exploitation colonies. However costly language endangerment is to typological
research in linguistics, we cannot forget the fact the speakers shift languages as
part of their adaptive responses to changing socioeconomic conditions (see also
Pandharipande 2003).
Linguists concerned with rights of languages must ask themselves whether these
rights prevail over the right of speakers to adapt competitively to their new socioe-
conomic ecologies. Advocates of the revitalization of endangered languages must
tell us whether the enterprise is possible without restoring the previous socioeco-
nomic ecologies that had sustained them. Like cultures, languages are dynamic,
complex adaptive systems that cannot be considered independent of the adaptive
needs of their speakers. In fact languages are constantly being shaped by those
who speak them, precisely what the indigenization of European languages illus-
trates. Moreover, like features associated with them, languages and cultures at any
given point in time are commodities with “market values”—“linguistic capitals”
according to Bourdieu (1991)—which are subject to competition and selection.
Speakers decide what is useful to them, and they determine history relative to their
current needs without any foresight. Such has been history in population genetics,
and such is it among humans, despite speakers’ occasional consciousness of it. It
is much easier to intervene in what affects our surroundings than in what affects
ourselves in our spontaneous behavior.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Cécile Vigouroux for useful editorial advice on my preliminary
draft.
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org
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12 Aug 2004 9:50 AR AR225-AN33-09.tex AR225-AN33-09.

sgm LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: IBC

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2004. 33:201–22

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH

Key Words ecology, exploitation colony, settlement colony, language

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 203

THE MEANINGS OF BIRTH AND DEATH

(2000) regarding Yiddish, languages as communal phenomena cannot be issued

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 205

QUESTIONING SOME USUAL ACCOUNTS

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 207

in favor of Vulgar Latin—and later, the Romance languages—or English. The

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 209

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 211

Dialogue Between the Recent and Distant Pasts

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 213

The fact that no Romance language developed at all in England—although Latin

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 215

in Mufwene (2001), parallelisms exist between language evolution in England

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 217

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 219

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org

LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH 221

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